The present disclosure relates to group messaging, commonly referred to as “Group-chat”.
How group chat users such as RCS (Rich Communication Services) group users should interwork with SMS (Shore Message Service) users is not standardized. Group-chat on SMS has serious limitations because of the existing phone and network technology where MSISDNs (Mobile Station International Subscriber Directory Number (telephone number)) are used to identify individual users. RCS Group chat invitations cannot be matched with address-book entries and RCS Group chat attendees are identified with MSISDN in Group chat invitation.
When a Group-chat invitation has no match with an address-book entry, when introducing Group-chat in the SMS-domain, a special MSISDN (which is not the MSISDN of the originator of the Group-chat) is used to identify/anchor the Group session. The SMS that contains the Group-chat invitation does not match with an entry in the device address-book and therefore is likely to be ignored by the recipient of the Group-chat invitation.
Regarding Group-chat attendees being identified with MSISDN, the generic implementation of Group-chat in SMS is that the MSISDN of a user is included in the message payload to identify the user that sent a message. This provides a poor user experience since the recipient of the Group-chat message will not be able to relate a received message with a person using the MSISDN.
The present disclosure addresses these problems.